HKUST Engineering x HKSTP Distinguished Speaker Series Webinar - Intelligent Architectures for Intelligent Machines
Computing is bottlenecked by data. Large amounts of application data overwhelm storage capability,
communication capability, and computation capability of the modern machines we design today. As a
result, many key applications' performance, efficiency and scalability are bottlenecked by data movement.
We describe three major shortcomings of modern architectures in terms of 1) dealing with data, 2) taking
advantage of the vast amounts of data, and 3) exploiting different semantic properties of application data.
We argue that an intelligent architecture should be designed to handle data well. We show that handling
data well requires designing architectures based on three key principles: 1) data-centric, 2) data-driven, 3)
data-aware. We give several examples for how to exploit each of these principles to design a much more
efficient and high performance computing system.
We will especially discuss recent research that aims to fundamentally reduce memory latency and energy,
and practically enable computation close to data, with at least two promising novel directions: 1)
performing massively-parallel bulk operations in memory by exploiting the analog operational properties
of memory, with low-cost changes, 2) exploiting the logic layer in 3D-stacked memory technology in various
ways to accelerate important data-intensive applications. We discuss how to enable adoption of such
fundamentally more intelligent architectures, which we believe are key to efficiency, performance, and
sustainability.
We conclude with some guiding principles for future computing architecture and system designs. Throughout
the talk, we will point out how open source hardware can enable innovation in and adoption of the
paradigms we introduce.
Onur Mutlu is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. He is also a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, where he previously held the Strecker Early Career Professorship. His current broader research interests are in computer architecture, systems, hardware security, and bioinformatics. A variety of techniques he, along with his group and collaborators, has invented over the years have influenced industry and have been employed in commercial microprocessors and memory/storage systems. He obtained his PhD and MS in ECE from the University of Texas at Austin and BS degrees in Computer Engineering and Psychology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He started the Computer Architecture Group at Microsoft Research (2006-2009), and held various product and research positions at Intel Corporation, Advanced Micro Devices, VMware, and Google.
Prof. Tim CHENG Kwang-Ting became the Dean of Engineering in May 2016 in concurrence with his appointment as Chair Professor jointly in the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering and in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. He graduated from University of California, Berkeley in 1988 with a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. Before joining HKUST, he was a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he served since 1993. Prior to teaching at UC Santa Barbara, he spent five years at AT&T Bell Laboratories.